K funkcím staročeského reflexiva sě

Abstract

The article deals with the functions of the reflexive morpheme sě in Old Czech. Three types of constructions containing the reflexive form are described: (1) constructions with the accusative form of the reflexive pronoun, (2) constructions that express spontaneous events, and (3) agent-demotion constructions. We focus on the most important syntactic and semantic characteristics of these constructions and also treat the criteria of animacy of the syntactic subject and verbal aspect. The constructions we describe are considered to be prototypes, hence they have no clear boundaries and therefore ambiguous cases whose interpretation is not clear can be found in the data. We thus pay attention to several types of these cases. Although all three construction types are to be found also in Modern Czech, the Old Czech constructions considerably differ from the Modern Czech ones. We therefore point out the most important of these differences.